By JIM EMERSON
I recently dreamt I was at an auditor training. I used to be an auditor myself and was remembering sloppy bookkeeping practices I dealt with. Only I realized that the topic of this dreamed audit training was climate change. It was focused on determining the environmental impact of everything we consume and providing a rating for every item we buy or use.
This applied to everything from plastic bags to gasoline to screws, lawn mowers, and toothpaste. Presumably, some scientists had come up with an objective way to rate every product, much like the nutrition facts we find on food products today. Every environmental impact for each item from its extraction from the earth to its manufacture, transport, storage, use, and ultimate disposal was rated.
Our training was to assure fair objective standards were being followed in developing the ratings. Every item got a rating from 1 to 100. And everyone who bought the item paid an additional fee based upon that rating to compensate for that environmental impact.
As I awoke, I realized two things. One, how complicated this would be and how subject to manipulation and distortion it could be. Two, my God, what if we . . . that is you and I, were each responsible for the full environmental impact of our consumption from “birth to death” (so to speak) of each item? What if we had to confront the likelihood that my toothpaste gets a 60 rating and cost $3 more when taking into account the full environmental impacts of creating the tube, the printing on the tube, the product itself, the transport of it, the manufacturing processes, and so on.
What would our world be like if we individually had that level of consciousness? We have tried to pin responsibility for detrimental environmental impacts on corporations and now more so on nations. What if we could wake up to this issue as individuals armed with objective information?
